Introduction

More Alaska voters than ever are voting by mail or in early voting this year. This page tracks the numbers as reported by the state.

The data come from the Alaska Division of Elections website It’s a 10-page pdf, so I ran a script using tabula-py to extract the data. Additional summary information is available here.I have republished the data here, where you can download the reports from each day. I had a google sheet that was updating automatically, but that kept breaking. Other caveats: this involves getting reports from all across the state, so there are probably reporting delays.

If you see any errors, contact Ben Matheson. Disclaimer - this may not be fully accurate or up to date. It also may break at any time. This is not official or affiliated with anything…enjoy!

Statewide Early Vote + Mail Ballots Sent, Received, and Rejected

These are the raw numbers for ballots sent to mail voters, ballots receieved, and early votes that were accepted.

Mail Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Received Percent Received Mail Ballots Rejected
117,984 59,551 50.47% 213

Note: these numbers should match what the state has published here.

Overall Early and Mail Vote Compared to 2016

Mail Ballots Sent to Voters and Received by State

Vote By Mail per Alaska House District

Early Voting Totals Per House District.

Early voting started Monday, October 19th. Here are the raw totals of votes in each Alaska House District.

Mail Ballots Sent to Voters, Received by State, and Rejected

District Number District Mail Ballots Received Mail Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Rejected Early Vote in Person
28 South Anchorage 3368 6121 5 829
24 Anchorage - Oceanview 2365 4552 6 676
33 Downtown Juneau/Douglas/Haines/ Skagway 2360 4998 9 1087
14 Eagle River/Chugach State Park 2284 4385 13 197
27 Anchorage - Basher 2268 4060 4 528
21 West Anchorage 2143 4309 4 725
22 Anchorage - Sand Lake 2075 3997 1 520
26 Anchorage - Huffman 2018 4255 6 591
20 Anchorage - Downtown 1991 3705 6 797
31 Homer/South Kenai 1933 4144 11 11
25 Anchorage - Abbott 1926 3786 5 539
18 Anchorage - Spenard 1915 3654 16 648
34 Mendenhall Valley 1847 4038 9 1406
04 Western Fairbanks 1830 3469 3 838
16 Anchorage - College Gate 1798 3359 7 452
35 Sitka/Petersburg 1669 3256 9 15
17 Anchorage - University 1594 3101 3 500
23 Anchorage - Taku 1520 2972 10 436
29 North Kenai 1511 3017 4 18
12 Chugiak/Gateway 1495 2997 7 701
11 Greater Palmer 1358 2653 8 1141
05 Chena Ridge/Airport 1352 2693 5 681
06 Eielson/Denali/Upper Yukon/Border Region 1352 2394 1 171
30 Kenai/Soldotna 1339 2743 9 6
13 Fort Richardson/North Eagle River 1316 2619 3 145
09 Richardson Hwy/East Mat-Su 1308 2542 5 530
10 Rural Mat-Su 1295 2746 1 681
01 Downtown Fairbanks 1098 2113 3 446
07 Greater Wasilla 1082 2245 4 1073
19 Anchorage - Mountainview 1075 2136 4 255
08 Big Lake/Point Mackenzie 1070 2207 5 805
32 Kodiak/Cordova/Seldovia 1056 2330 3 12
15 Elmendorf 1031 2177 7 233
36 Ketchikan/Wrangell/Metlakatla/Hydaburg 1023 2171 5 3
03 North Pole/Badger 825 1671 3 351
02 Fairbanks/Wainwright 755 1486 1 271
37 Bristol Bay/Aleutians/Upper Kuskokwim 520 1143 5 14
38 Lower Kuskokwim 299 641 0 5
39 Bering Straits/Yukon Delta 245 517 2 163
40 Arctic 206 529 1 8
99 NA 36 53 0 0

Mail Voting Relative to Voter Registration and Voter Turnout per House District

For each Alaska House district, I have the number of registered voters (as of October 3, this report). You can see which districts are seeing more take-up of mail voting relative to their voter base. Additional this compares the 2020 completed mail ballots to the full 2016 election turnout.

This is not really finished yet. Also I just made up the regional labels.

Partisan Explanation on Vote by Mail

This looks at the relationship between relative vote-by-mail activity and voting results from the 2016 presidential election. The y axis is the percentage of mail votes returned relative to the total 2016 turnout. The x axis and color is the margin by which Donald Trump won or lost the district in 2016. The basic trend you see is that the redder the disrict, the less vote-by-mail there is, so far. The key exception is western Alaska (in the lower left), which voted for Clinton but is not seeing much vote-by-mail participation yet.

Voting Method Breakdown by House District

Mail and Online Rejections Per House District

About

The Alaska Division of Elections data is originally is published in a 10-page PDF that I parsed to extract the data. This uses a combination of R and Python. The Python uses Tabula to pull out the data. After that, an R script cleans out extra spaces, gaps, and labels the rows by house district and adds descriptions. I wanted to do everything in R, but I couldn’t get rJava loaded for the Tabulizer, so the tabula-py library ended up being more expedient.

This page is an RMarkdown document that calculates some summary stats, like percent rejected and then displays the data in several ggplot2 plots. The PDF parsing in particular may be brittle and this could definitely break at anytime.